Is Your Wall Thickness Enough for a Hollow Resin Model?
Intro: Is Your Wall Thickness Enough for a Hollow Resin Model?
If you wanted to save material and money, you may hollow the models out so as to reduce the volume of your models. Creating a hollow model means that you need to design your object with “walls”. When it comes to wall thickness, it is important to understand it so that you can print 3D objects successfully. Is your wall thickness enough for a hollow resin model?
STEP 1: What’s Wall Thickness
Wall thickness is the distance between the outer surface of your model and the opposite inner surface. You need to know how thick the wall of your objects is supposed to be and guarantee that your model is thick enough before printing. Wall thickness is very important when 3D printing as thin walls or zero thickness walls will cause the print to fail because of its fragility.
Every 3D printing material has different characteristics. So there is no a single, “one-size-fits-all” wall thickness to recommend for each and every 3D printing material. A same wall thickness for different resins like rigid resin and flexible resin may result in different print quality.
Besides, wall thickness of a 3D model may depend on more factors including model size and overall design of the 3D part. Never mind! There are still some general principles about wall thickness to follow.
STEP 2: Minimum Wall Thickness
When the wall thickness is too thin, you may encounter problems and issues relating to 3d design and quality. The minimum cross sectional wall thickness on any part is very much dependent on the overall part size and design. Illustrated as the above pictures, the print on the right is broken due to the thin wall thickness and some edges of it are even warping.
Left: 5mm wall thickness Right: 2mm wall thickness
The minimum wall thickness refers to the minimum thickness that your model should have for any given material or technology. As for resin 3D printing, it’s better to go quite fine with minimum wall thicknesses of 2 mm.
STEP 3: What Can Be Done?
For adjusting the right wall thickness, you may notice that some software such as ChiTuBox will be helpful. Here we commend ChiTuBox because you can finish hollowing out, adding escape holes and even infilling in this powerful slicing tool. And in latest ChiTuBox 1.5.0, hole depth is available to be customized for models with different depths.
If you need to know more about how to hollow 3D prints out how to infill 3D prints, the two videos above will be helpful.
Model source: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2767170